Google promises Chrome hackers $1m in rewards

Google on Monday withdrew as a sponsor of next month’s Pwn2Own hacking contest, and will instead put as much as $1 million up for grabs if researchers can exploit Chrome. The reason for the withdraw is that Google is unhappy that contestants are allowed to enter the competition without having to reveal full exploits to vendors - or even all of the bugs used.

"The aim of our sponsorship is simple: we have a big learning opportunity when we receive full end-to-end exploits. Not only can we fix the bugs, but by studying the vulnerability and exploit techniques we can enhance our mitigations, automated testing, and sandboxing. This enables us to better protect our users," say Chris Evans and Justin Schuh of the Chrome Security Team on a company blog.

"We decided to withdraw our sponsorship when we discovered that contestants are permitted to enter Pwn2Own without having to reveal full exploits, or even all of the bugs used, to vendors. Full exploits have been handed over in previous years, but it's an explicit non-requirement in this year's contest, and that's worrisome."

Google will reward winning contestants with prizes of $60,000, $40,000, and $20,000 depending on the severity of the exploits they demonstrate on Windows 7 machines running the browser.

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